1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to devices, methods, and computer programs providing differentiated services for network traffic. Specifically, the invention relates to a system in which differentiated services are provided using a combination of traffic flow weighting, group queues, and congestion management.
2. Description of Related Art
Network service providers offer differentiated services in order to tailor customer bandwidth demands based on priority levels of a customer's network traffic. In particular, higher priority traffic is generally given preference over lower priority traffic, thus increasing bandwidth and reducing delay for higher priority traffic at the expense of the lower priority traffic. However, many traditional differentiated services methods do not properly balance high priority and low priority traffic. As a result, lower priority traffic sometimes can be prematurely discarded in conditions of network congestion.